Haiku Alpha 3 has been in development for more than 14 months. In that time more than 800 bugs have been identified and fixed, major sections have been updated, applications have been added and updated, and great progress has been made in supporting additional hardware. Here is a summary of updates, more details can be found here. Also inside, interviews with some core Haiku developers.

Really looking forward to seeing Haiku ready for production. I have followed this project since the very first minute of it's existence.

I spent a few hours the other day browsing the source code and I was really impressed with it's design. It's kernel is of a hybrid design that is up to par with (if not better than) modern OS's like Windows NT and OS X. Fully integrated GUI, and pretty much designed from the ground up to kick ass. The same cannot be said of GNU Linux, which is nothing more than a hack job built on top of an outdated monolithic kernel design.

I know it's still several years away, but when the multi-user and server versions of Haiku are ready, I'll switch all my Linux/BSD stuff to it in a heartbeat.

By that definition, all modern kernels are hack jobs:
* NT is constantly undergoing source chopping of outdated / redundant features (aka the MinWin project) * XNU (OS X's kernel) runs heavily hacked versions of Mach and BSD.
* SVR4 (of which Solaris has evolved from) was built from a need to unify the different UNIXs - so has code hacked from all over the shop.

It's impossible to maintain a working kernel without having to hack bits from time to time - and this is more so the case in open source where projects will share schedulers (et al) from one and another.

In fact, I'd be more worried if a modern kernel hadn't seen it's fair share of hacking.

A modern kernel obviously uses some form of distributed microkernel design with Internet and social networking integration.

You see, each time such a computer connects to the internet, it becomes automatically parts of the "hive mind". When someone starts a power-intensive calculation on such a modern OS, like a Blender render, that calculation is distributed across all available nodes, resulting in render times that are pretty close to the latency of the slowest connexion for still HD images.

And because this modern OS is based on a microkernel with AES-encrypted message passing as the main IPC method, security breaches never occur.

(Note : This was a joke, based on my vision of current academia OS design fantasies. You are asked not to take it seriously. Please. Pretty please.)